Festivities are already underway for the computer mouse, which turns 40 on December 9th. It’s a happy time for the little pointing device, so we all need to forget, just for a little while, all those spreadsheet cells we’ve had to click on with it. And please, whatever you do, do not bring up all the occasions you were forced to penetrate its ball-hole with a Q-tip. We’re in polite company here.
No, let’s talk about the best times: the times the mouse was a game controller. A humble game controller, and possibly the best one ever made. Let’s walk down memory lane, and think about some of the greatest moments in the history of mouse-based gaming.
1987: Maniac Mansion, one of the earliest graphical adventure games designed to be more about clicking than text parsing, began the era of LucasArt’s genre dominance. Starting here the mouse spent about a decade in the SCUMM engine, clicking on all manner of slimy, horrible things.
1990: The SNES Mouse brings it pointy, clicky goodness to Mario Paint. This version of the mouse spent it formative years as a fly swatter, and today it enjoys a retirement as one of YouTube’s most popular composers.
1992: Dune II ensures that real-time strategy will forever be mouse-based. Or at least until somebody actually manages to crack the control scheme on console—there’s certainly enough people trying.
1994: Marathon becomes the first-person shooter that popularizes mouselook as the de-facto standard for gun pointing and neck moving. This innovation remains the most accurate and enjoyable form of control in the genre; it took nearly a decade (and the work of Bungie, again) before console’s little thumbsticks even came close.
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